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dbeacon(1)		     General Commands Manual		      dbeacon(1)

NAME
     dbeacon - Distributed IPv4/IPv6 multicast beacon

SYNOPSYS
     dbeacon   -a  MAIL  -b  BEACON_ADDR[/PORT]  [-i  INTFNAME]  [-n  NAME]  [-S
     [GROUP_ADDR[/PORT]] [-s ADDR] [-d [FILE]] [-I  NUMBER]  [-W  type$url]  [-L
     program] [-C CC] [-4] [-6] [-v] [-P] [-U] [-V] [-F flag] [-O] [-B ADDR]

DESCRIPTION
     dbeacon  is  a network level management tool aiming at getting various sta-
     tistics about multicast connectivity. Its first usage is to  check  out  if
     you can send/receive toward/from an IPv4/IPv6 multicast network. Its second
     usage is to gather various statistics by using a known multicast ASM group,
     for  example TTL between each multicast peers, loss or jitter figures. The-
     ses statistics are kept internally but can be dumped periodically in a file
     in xml format for latter processing. Statistics  gathering  is  completetly
     distributed  and rely on the powerful nature of ASM. No server is required,
     but maybe a http server for accessing the statistics and build an adjacency
     matrix of the peers.

OPTIONS
     -n NAME, -name NAME
	    The name identifying you on the dbeacon session. If  not  specified,
	    dbeacon will use the hostname of the running machine.

     -a MAIL
	    Administrative contact. This is an e-mail used for join you, for ex-
	    ample  to  notify you that something is wrong is your multicast con-
	    nectivity

     -i IN, -interface IN
	    Use IN instead of the default interface for multicast.

     -b BEACON_ADDR/PORT
	    This is the IPv4/IPv6 address of the ASM group used  by  dbeacon  to
	    gather statistics. It can be specified as a DNS name too.

     -S GROUP_ADDR/PORT
	    Enables SSM reception/sending on optional GROUP_ADDR/PORT

     -O     This  option enable SSM data sending in addition to ASM data. It can
	    be used to check if people can reach you via SSM.

     -B ADDR
	    This allows you to bootstrap from an ADDR that is already in the ma-
	    trix. This option is useful when you ASM connectivity is broken  but
	    SSM connectivity works.

     -P, -ssmping
	    Enable SSM Ping server capability.

     -s ADDR
	    Bind  to  local  address.  This  allow  you to specify the multicast
	    source of the packets sent by your beacon.

     -d FILE
	    Dump periodic reports to dump.xml or specified file. This  file  may
	    be	latter	processed by any XML compliant script. On a http server,
	    you can process the dump to create a nice adjacency matrix.

     -I NUMBER, -interval NUMBER
	    Interval between refresh of the dump file. Defaults to 5 secs if not
	    specified

     -W URL, -website URL
	    Specify a website to announce.

     -Wm URL, -matrix URL
	    Specify your matrix URL.

     -Wl URL, -lg URL
	    Specify your looking glass URL.

     -C CC  Specify your two letter Country Code.

     -L program
	    Launch program after each dump. The first argument will be the  dump
	    filename.

     -F flag
	    Specify  a	flag to announce. For example to announce that your host
	    is running a ssmpingd deamon, use 'ssmping' as a flag.

     -4, -ipv4
	    Force IPv4 usage (Default is IPv6).

     -6, -ipv6
	    Force IPv6 usage

     -v     verbose mode (use several for more verbosity)

     -U     Dump periodic bandwidth usage reports to stdout

     -D, -daemon
	    fork to the background (daemonize)

     -pidfile FILE
	    Path to the PID file to write to.

     -syslog
	    Outputs using syslog facility.

     -c FILE
	    Specifies the configuration file to use. Each of the above	command-
	    line parameters can be defined there.

     -V, -version
	    Outputs version information and leaves

BUGS
     Should be reported to the core developer Hugo Santos <hugo@fivebits.net>.

HISTORY
     dbeacon  is  a  joint work of Hugo Santos, Sebastien Chaumontet and Mickael
     Hoerdt. It has been done in the early days of the m6bone, when nobody  knew
     if  the SPTs or RPTs were being used between hosts and also to evaluate the
     performance and deployment of SSM.

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